antedating of y'all (1702)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Nice find! .

This is unequivocally "y'all," and it's unequivocally from 1702.

But it may not be the kind of "y'all" we-uns is lookin' for.

That kind would be a "y'all" (or even a "you-all") used more or less
routinely in informal speech. This "y'all" appears instead to be a one-off
jocular contraction in a humorous, though formal, context.

In other words, it's relationship to Southern "y'all" is doubtful.

In fact it's extremely doubtful. Why? Because there's nothing again till
1856. That's a century and a half and an ocean away.  It's seems most
unlikely that if "y'all" were being used as routinely as it is in the U.S.
South somewhere in 18th C. England, there'd be other examples among those
180,000 titles.

Now if a bunch of conversational "you all"s  were to be found (addressed to
only two rather than a bunch of people) that would be extremely significant.

(I've searched for 18th century "you all"s, but ECCO isn't quite up to it,
giving thousands of false hits.  "Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685 -
1835," however, comes up with no positives at all. That's hard to brush
aside.)

But "y'all" in 1702 is nicely heuristic.

JL








On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 2:43 PM, David Parker <dparker at kennesaw.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       David Parker <dparker at KENNESAW.EDU>
> Subject:      antedating of y'all (1702)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "To Write well’s hard, but I appeal to y’all,
> Is’t not much harder not to Write at all."
>
> from “Prologue to the Fate of Capua,” by the Honourable Charles Boyle,
> Esq., in _A collection of poems: viz. The temple of death: by the Marquis
> of Normanby. . . . _  Second edition.  London: printed for Ralph Smith, at
> the Bible under the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, 1702. P. 434
>
> The poem refers to _The Fate of Capua_, a play first published in 1700 by
> the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne.
>
> I found this in Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a great
> resource of over 180,000 titles.
>
> Previous earliest citation was (I think) Barry Popik's 1856.
>
> >
> > On Dec. 30, Barry Popik alerted us to his new page on "y'all", which
> > he has dated back to 1856-7, in Alfred W. Arrington's novel _The
> > Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha, or Life Among the Lawless: A
> > Tale of the Republic of Texas_.
> >
> > http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/texas/entry/yall/
> >
>
>
> David B. Parker
> Professor of History
> Assistant Chair,
>   Dept. of History & Philosophy
> Kennesaw State University
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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